


Book & Bell

by SeriousMistakes (TruckThat)



Category: Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle
Genre: AU, M/M, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-19
Updated: 2013-04-19
Packaged: 2017-12-08 22:11:10
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 20,742
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/766600
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TruckThat/pseuds/SeriousMistakes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An AU where Kurogane is (mostly) the son of a small-town baker and Fai is... not.  Also featuring wizards, raisin muffins, curses, an abandoned house, and a series of terrible mistakes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Book & Bell

**Author's Note:**

> A million years ago, this was originally going to be a Howl's Moving Castle AU. That didn't quite happen, but it allllllmost did, and this fic still owes a pretty noticeable debt to Diana Wynne Jones. The title (and the curse it refers to) is extremely loosely inspired by the old "bell, book, and candle" Catholic excommunication ritual, basically because it seemed like a good idea at the time. There's a whole page on Wikipedia if you're into that! And if you haven't read Howl's Moving Castle, get out of here, go do it now. The Miyazaki film doesn't count. Even if it's pretty.
> 
> Also I should probably say thanks to cahootsandotherthings for letting me yell at you about this for over a year and then reading through it anyway despite the many threats it posed to our friendship. Whoops.
> 
> Finally I just want to say that I promise, I PROMISE, that Fai is actually in this story.

Kurogane was eight years old when his mother got sick.  Really sick.  Sick enough that Kurogane’s father, who had always been the only person who could tell a joke so funny that even Kurogane couldn’t help but laugh, began walking around with his mouth set in a terrible, straight line when he thought that Kurogane couldn’t see. 

Kurogane had never paid that much attention in school, but all that winter he tried his very best, and that was why.  And it worked, too: when he got straight A’s on his January report, his mother smiled at him, as wide as Kurogane had ever seen her smile.  But her smile was all see-through around the edges and she was thinner now than she’d been at Christmastime. She was so thin, it was almost hard for Kurogane to smile back without thinking about how maybe this was something not at all like a scraped knee that would fix itself in time.

So that was when Kurogane wrote to the wizard for help.

It was a long letter, full of all the details of how long she’d been sick and how Kurogane was almost sure that she was getting paler every day.  He almost didn’t send it, though, because not one of the old ladies who came into the bakery every morning knew where the wizard lived at all.  No one even knew if there _was_ a wizard anymore.  Depending on which old lady you talked to, he hadn't been seen for ten years, or a hundred years, or since the summer when it rained for two months solid and the wheat all died.  It was only by chance that Kurogane learned that the wizard had a post box—or, more accurately, that the post office had a box that was rumoured to belong to a wizard, although the postmaster was prepared to swear that he’d never noticed anyone checking the box.  Still, the postmaster didn't stop Kurogane from trying to cram his oversize envelope through the slot.  He just raised his eyebrows and kept on chewing his pencil.  Kurogane was determined not to be worried, though.  Because surely, surely, any wizard who was any kind of wizard at all would write back. 

Halfway home, Kurogane realized that he hadn't put his own address on the envelope.  He hadn’t put _any_ address on the envelope, hadn’t even signed the letter, and now there was no way for the wizard to know who he was. What if the wizard checked his mail _right now_ and he—Kurogane skidded around and ran back, as fast as he could go.  "Hey," he burst back inside and bulled his way to stand in front of the postmaster's desk again, panting, "hey, you've gotta let me—"

_Take that letter back_ , was what he was going to say, only there was someone else in the post office: a total stranger, obviously not from Kurogane's town or any of the neighboring farms, either.  The kind of person you almost never saw in a sleepy place like this one.  The kind of person who probably didn’t expect some kid to cut in front of him in line.  Kurogane froze, gasping from running all the way down the road and suddenly too embarrassed to admit what had happened.

The very _foreign_ -looking foreigner looked at him carefully—maybe there was something strange about the man's eyes, but Kurogane wasn't paying enough attention to remember it properly, later on—and gave Kurogane a slanted, wry sort of smile.  At least he wasn’t angry.  Probably.  Well, if he was, that was his own freaking problem.  The man fished around inside his enormous coat for a second and produced a sheet of creamy, old-fashioned parchment, apparently none the worse for being stored in his pocket all day. 

"Here.  Will this do?" Kurogane gaped at him, but the man just smiled more broadly and handed him the paper more insistently.  "Please take it. You really look like you need to send that letter more than I do," he said. "There's no need to repay the favour."  Just possibly, he meant it in a kindly way.  It seemed more likely that he was being sarcastic.  He'd swept out the door before Kurogane could do anything but burn with righteous eight-year-old indignation, either way.

"Well," the postmaster mumbled around his disgusting pencil, _definitely_ sarcastically, "are you sending something else, or aren't you?" 

So Kurogane wrote nothing except his address on the sheet in his angriest handwriting and shoved it all crumpled up into the slot where the first letter had gone.  He knew the wizard was going to think he was stupid, too stupid to be worth anyone’s time.

And the wizard—the wizard wrote back that very Thursday.  It wasn’t a long letter, and it didn’t come by mail; it just appeared in the letterbox of Kurogane’s little cottage next door to the bakery without any stamp at all on it.  The wizard had beautiful manners and beautiful, asymmetrical, illegible handwriting, and he didn’t even call Kurogane stupid for forgetting to put in his address.  Kurogane cried for half an hour after he read the reply.  He wept horrible, hot, angry, sticky tears muffled into the back of his fist because what kind of an idiot, piece-of-shit wizard couldn’t even fix somebody when it really counted? 

Then he straightened his back like the man he wasn’t quite yet, and went into the kitchen to make his mother some tea sweetened with just a little of the powder that the wizard had sent along with his note.

Things were a bit better for a little while after that.  Kurogane’s mother wasn’t so pale.  She smiled more often and although she never stopped getting thinner, some of the brittle translucence left her and she said it hurt a little less.  The wizard was right.  Kurogane made his mother tea twice a day, every day without fail, and he wrote to the wizard for more powder every month without fail as winter turned into spring and then into summer.

The wizard never failed to send it, and he never asked for payment, and he never reminded Kurogane that he was being stupid about anything at all.

 

Three days after his ninth birthday, Kurogane’s mother died anyway.  It was no one’s fault – and that was the worst part of all, probably, when his father cried at the funeral and there was nobody that Kurogane could blame.  Kurogane didn’t cry this time.  After all, the wizard had told him the truth.  He might’ve written to tell the wizard this, just so that the wizard would know that there wasn’t any need to worry about making the medicine anymore, but Kurogane was suddenly too busy worrying, himself.

There was school to worry about, of course, because his mother cared about things like that even if Kurogane still couldn’t see anything about math class that wasn’t pointless.  Somehow all the things his mother cared about were even more important now.  And there was his father’s bakery, too.  There was no baker’s apprentice right now, but his father looked so tired that Kurogane could tell he needed the help.   So Kurogane helped.  That would’ve been enough to keep any nine-year-old busy all on its own, but then a bit later on, there was Kurogane’s other secret.  An even bigger secret than his letters to the wizard.

The secret was that Kurogane just _learned_ things.

Not like math, and not like Tomoyo, the pastor’s daughter, practicing the same hymn over and over on the church’s massive, creaky old organ until she knew it by heart.  Kurogane just had to see something done, just once, and he'd be able to do it.  He would know it forever whether he wanted to or not; little things and big things, and usually the things he wanted to know the least.  Not all the time, but—sometimes.  With some things.  Kurogane learned.

Sometimes in the evenings he snuck into the choir loft of the empty church to watch Tomoyo practice.  They were friends, sort of, in the way where she was in the same grade and usually nice even though it always seemed a bit like she was laughing at him.  She would inevitably catch him up there and make him help with her chores once she was done.  Kurogane grumbled about that, but he didn’t really mind helping to sweep underneath the pews.  Mainly, though, he went because was hoping to learn to play the organ.  Making music probably wasn't the most useful thing in the world, not useful like cooking or hunting or winning in a fight, but it sounded beautiful when Tomoyo did it.  She _looked_ beautiful while she did it.  Kurogane realized after a while that he liked just being there, even though he never quite managed to pick any of it up.

That wasn't true of baking.  He didn't even like baking, really—most of his father's business was staples, breads and rolls, and Kurogane didn't mind those so much, but the pastries were always too sweet for his tastes.  It didn't matter how Kurogane felt about it, though.  The fact was that after two days of watching his father measure flour and proof dough, Kurogane could have followed any recipe at all with perfect success.  He could have done it after watching his father for two seconds.  And even though he was sure he didn't want to be a baker forever, Kurogane was proud to be able to help.  He was proud to wake up at four o'clock every morning before school to shoulder his share of honest work.

The old ladies who came for fresh bread and gossip every morning thought it was sweet.  Kurogane thought it was what it was, more or less.  And if Kurogane's father thought his son's talents were strange, or worrying, or anything at all out of the usual for a sleepy country town on the edge of the hills, he never once said so. 

Besides, on Saturday mornings Kurogane's orange-raisin-bran muffins brought customers in from two towns over.  Privately, Kurogane didn't think the muffins were all that great.  They were too sweet, almost as sweet as the cakes, and he didn't even know where two towns over _was_.  But that didn't stop him from being secretly just a little bit proud of that, too.

 

Months went by like this, and then years did, while Kurogane grew tall and stubborn and very probably more serious than ever.  He never thought of the future and only once remembered to think of writing to the wizard.

That was one day in winter, late enough that they were lighting the streetlamps outside.  Kurogane should have been expected at home, but when he stepped into the kitchen, his father sat at the table, sharpening a sword that Kurogane hadn’t ever seen before with hands that were both reverent and familiar on the steel.  It was a long, vicious, beautiful thing—a thing that didn’t belong to anyone who owned a bakery.  His father must have forgotten the time.

Kurogane stepped back out into the yard and came in again, much more slowly and loudly than before.  This time, when he opened the door, his father was just coming out of his own bedroom.  He didn’t look particularly rushed, but he was empty-handed now all the same.

It was too late anyway.  His father's calm hands with the whetstone had already told Kurogane that he knew very well how to use the sword.   Kurogane understood this with absolute certainty, the same certainty with which he knew how to make the orange-raisin-bran muffins that were the bakery's best seller.  And, in exactly the same way that he'd watched his father knead the bread dough just once and known, just by looking, every trade secret his father knew about crusts and yeast types and oven temperatures, that one second where Kurogane stood frozen in the doorway was enough.  He’d watched his father follow the whetstone patiently with the oiled cloth, and Kurogane knew absolutely that he could wield that sword now, too.  He knew the sword's name and the weight and resistance of swinging it true when it was perfectly sharp.  And he knew that his father had not always been a baker.  What kind of baker knew a hundred sword forms and a hundred different ways to cut, to be sure that your opponent would be killed cleanly?

The day after Kurogane accidentally learned from his father how to slide a blade between two ribs and twist just so, so that it would stop the heart instantly, Kurogane went up to the choir loft of the church with a sheaf of paper and a pencil.  He didn't even try to pay attention to the way Tomoyo's music worked today.  Instead, he wrote the longest letter he'd ever written to the wizard, the only letter he'd written since his mother's death.   When he finished, he folded his letter in half and ripped it cleanly in two and then four and then eight—because it was ridiculous and even if maybe the wizard would've known what to say in reply, he was a useless wizard and he would never be able to solve Kurogane's problem.  He hadn't managed to solve the last one either, in the end.

As always, Tomoyo found him sitting there in the half-dark and ordered him to help out so sweetly that he agreed without thinking.  Kurogane ended up doing almost all the chores himself anyway.  Exactly like always.

Tomoyo was a good musician, maybe a brilliant one, but Kurogane never picked up even a single Christmas carol from her.  It didn’t seem to matter how many times he watched her play.  Instead, he found himself with a lot of time alone with the dust and the hymns to think.  Mostly he thought in circles about his father and the sword, or about his mother’s fading laugh, or about leaving.  He’d take the sword and just... walk into the hills to the north and not stop for anything.

But he always stayed.

 

The spring when he was fifteen, the butcher's daughter cornered Kurogane behind the general store and told him, all in a rush, that she had liked him since they were both twelve years old.  Kurogane could not recall having done a single thing to make her think that liking him might be a good idea.  He couldn't recall saying anything particularly worth crying over, either, but for some reason she ran home in tears.  A week later, her eldest brother dragged Kurogane behind the same store and tried his best to give Kurogane a black eye.  Kurogane let him do it because that was something he did understand.  Maybe he felt a little bad about making a girl cry, too, even if it wasn't on purpose.

Her younger brother followed Kurogane around for six whole months after that with the same hopeful, avaricious gleam in his eye that had been in his sister's before Kurogane turned her down.  But Kurogane certainly hadn't ever tried to encourage _that_.  Besides, he wasn't stupid enough to let himself be cornered in the same place three times in a row.

 

By the time he turned sixteen and the butcher’s boy lost interest, Kurogane had been sneaking his father’s sword out of its hiding place almost every day for an entire year.  He practiced with the sword in secret, in the empty paddock by the millpond, running one-by-one through all of the hundred forms that he’d learned from his father while afternoon turned into evening.  Tomoyo knew about it because he’d had to tell her _something_ about where he went every day.  No one else needed to know.  A road ran past the paddock but it was dusty and rarely-used, the road to the hills, and he’d chosen it because he was as safe from discovery there as he was anywhere. 

Except he wasn’t completely safe.  One evening, late, a man with a satchel and an unseasonably heavy coat came wandering along the road from the hills.  He was humming under his breath, something complicated.  A young man.  He had curious eyes and hair the same colour as the dust-bleached August dusk, so that he might almost have been there all along, unseen.  Inexcusably, Kurogane was so absorbed that he didn’t notice the traveller at all—despite the humming—until the humming suddenly stopped.

Kurogane spun around with a curse, forgetting and then not caring that he still had the sword raised in his hands.  The traveller stood in the middle of the road, just as frozen.  It must have looked either stupid or terrifying; most likely both.  But the man seemed like he regretted calling attention to himself for some other reason altogether.  Like he was trying to decide between surprise and some sharper emotion that didn’t show at all. 

“You’re still here?” He was staring at Kurogane’s face instead of his weapon and he looked—wary.   Not even aware of Kurogane’s sword.

“The hell’s that supposed to mean?” Kurogane barked.   He was so indignant at being addressed this way that he forgot to be embarrassed about being caught doing something so ridiculous.  Maybe he’d _meant_ to threaten this man.

Rather than looking properly chastened, though, the man walked up to drape himself over the paddock fence and stare even more intently at Kurogane.   There was a guarded, carefully lazy twist to his mouth that made Kurogane wonder if he’d imagined that fleeting, off-balance look.  He had the eyes of someone who would never allow himself to be caught off balance, least of all by some baker’s son with a sharp stick.  Someone who was sure of things that Kurogane had never even thought to consider, and who still never bothered to say what he meant.  Up close, he was pretty tall.  Not as tall as Kurogane, but tall enough to piss him off.  “I probably meant, what is a boy who can do _that_ ,” his gaze slid deliberately along the blade that Kurogane was still holding, “doing living in a town like this one?”

Bullshit.

Kurogane was tall enough and broad enough that it’d been a long damn time since someone mistook him for a little boy, and he told the stranger so.  Even if the stranger had been to a dozen places Kurogane had never even imagined going, even if he’d been to a _thousand_ —well, so what?  As if he had the right to walk into Kurogane’s town and expect him to give a shit about any of that.  The man just smiled politely—a brittle, suddenly unpleasant expression that made his light eyes look shadowy—and went on like he was having some other conversation entirely.  “Anyway,” he said, mostly to himself, “you’re young enough that it shouldn’t matter to me _what_ you are.”

“What do you mean, what I am?  I’m not— I told you, I’m not some lousy kid,” Kurogane rumbled, clenching his fist tighter on the hilt, feeling like more of a threat by the second.  “I’m a baker.  I learned the sword by watching my father.”  That was more than half the truth, which was twice as much as some stranger on the road deserved.

The man made a thoughtful little sound, like this wasn’t the kind of answer he’d expected, and dropped the false smile.  The shadows stayed.  Maybe he hadn’t expected any answer at all.  “Will you tell me your name?” he asked, odd and formal.

“Kurogane.”  As he said it, he had the unsettling suspicion that he couldn’t have refused even if he’d wanted to.  Couldn’t walk away from the conversation.

“Well.”  The man straightened abruptly. That seemed to be the end of whatever discussion he thought they’d been having, but he was still watching.  Looking carefully—looking _only_ —at Kurogane’s face as if some other invisible intent was waiting behind all his cool words.  Only Kurogane couldn’t imagine what the hell it might be.  “It’s a hot day for sword practice, Kuro-sama, but you should still put a shirt on,” he said, almost softly, and strode off in the direction he’d come from with his spine set sharp.

Kurogane was left blinking in the lowering sunlight, half furious and half wondering where on earth the traveller thought he was going, if it wasn’t into town to buy his supper.  There was nothing out that way—no place to stay at all.  Wind rippled suddenly over the millpond and Kurogane shivered.  Time to go. 

He was all the way home, sharpening the sword and oiling it to put it away, before he realized what the darkness around the traveller had been.  Hunger.  The same as the greed in the butcher’s daughter’s eyes, and in her youngest brother’s, and also very much not the same kind of greed they’d had at all.  Kurogane didn’t borrow his father’s sword again.  He spent more of his free time than ever in the dusty parts of the church, letting Tomoyo boss him around.

 

“You know, Kurogane,” Tomoyo said, one day a long enough time later that Kurogane had mostly forgotten the whole thing by the millpond, “you could just go.”

“Go where?” Kurogane finished locking the church door behind them both, half listening and half thinking about fried steak for dinner. 

 “Away.  To the hills where you’re always looking, or someplace else.  This village is my home, but you... sometimes I think your fate is far away.”  Tomoyo was smiling in the sad way that she probably practiced just to make Kurogane uncomfortable.  She was pretty enough that it worked.  

Well, he was listening now.  Kurogane stared at Tomoyo for so long that the moment passed, and then scoffed, disgruntled, and headed for home without saying goodbye.  It was ridiculous.  Nobody left to look for their fate, not outside of fairy stories.  Kurogane had thought that kind of thing was stupid even when he was young enough to believe in it.  And he was hurt, a little, not that he’d admit it—Tomoyo was his oldest, his _only_ friend, and now she thought he should _just_ _go_? 

This was when they were both nineteen and school wasn’t stopping either of them from leaving anymore.  But Kurogane had his work as the church caretaker—a real, paid job and he was as serious about doing it well as he was about everything else—and there was his father’s bakery, although his father had two real apprentices now and the workload was less.  And Tomoyo was seeing some farmer’s son that Kurogane didn’t like the look of; or more specifically, Kurogane didn’t like the way that the farmer’s son looked at Tomoyo.  The village was his home, too, and he couldn’t leave.  Wouldn’t leave.

 

When he was twenty-two, Kurogane did leave.  It was Tomoyo’s fault, not for suggesting it in the first place but for getting married like Kurogane had never really, honestly believed that she would. 

He went to her June wedding.  He walked in front of her down the aisle of the same tiny church where he’d spent practically all of his teenage years, and he stood solidly behind her at the altar because she was his best friend.  His only friend.  And when the service was over, he swept up the rice—he was the caretaker; it was his job—and locked the big doors, and walked.  He got all the way to the crossroads where the farmland he knew changed into the open forest of the hills where no one ever went before he even noticed that he was still wearing his wedding clothes.   But by then it was too late to go back—and anyways, it wasn’t as though he was leaving forever.  Just until it got dark, probably, and then he’d go home.  As he walked, Kurogane thought about his mother, and his father, and the feel of that sword in Kurogane’s hand, slicing through air, and a hundred other things that hadn’t seemed important in a long time.

The road wound up, over the first line of hills, and it got chillier and chillier as Kurogane went until it felt more like a cloudy March day than the June afternoon it had been.  He pulled his jacket back on and hurried up and onward, although perhaps he should have hurried home.  Before he could hurry for too long though, Kurogane rounded a bend and nearly walked into someone coming down the road in the other direction.

“Um.”  Kurogane said.  “Good afternoon.”  He was shocked into friendliness.

The other man looked just as surprised, but he must not have been in a hurry at all because he shook that expression off and stopped walking.  He scanned Kurogane up and down like he was struggling not to laugh a private joke, probably at Kurogane’s expense.  “Is there a party that I haven’t been invited to?”

“A what?”

“A party,” the man twirled a finger at Kurogane’s stiff white shirt collar.  It wasn’t as if Kurogane had worn it _on purpose_.  “Or—Fortune-seeking, then?” he asked. “But it doesn’t seem like you’ve packed very well, if that’s the case.”

“There was a wedding,” Kurogane grumbled, uncomfortably reminded of all Tomoyo’s misty-eyed talk of fate.  That conversation seemed like a long, idiotic time ago out here with the wind biting cold and seriously threatening to bring in the rain.  “It’s not even my stupid jacket.”

“I can tell,” the man said.  Kurogane bristled. “Is it really nice to wear your father’s suit jacket out fortune-seeking when it might get rained on?”

“I’m not seeking anyone’s damn fortune,” Kurogane snapped, at the limits of reasonable patience.  “Besides, there’s—” he blinked and almost forgot to be angry.  They were standing at a fork in the road that Kurogane hadn’t even noticed; one branch led straight, farther into the hills, and the other, the one Kurogane somehow hadn’t seen until just now, veered steeply off to the left, to a gated hedge and a mansion behind it.   It was as if the whole tiny valley had materialized suddenly out of the gathering mist.  But no, Kurogane had just been distracted by trying not to trip over this idiot.  “There’s a house right over there.  I’ll just go there until it stops raining.”

“Ah, wait a minute.  No,” the stranger said, sounding suddenly doubtful, “I don’t think it will rain after all. And even if it does... I would go home before I’d choose to wait the rain out there, if I were you.”

“What do you mean?” Kurogane asked narrowly.  Something about his tone was off, somehow.  Almost nervous.

“Oh,” the man said, airily and unconvincingly, seeming more suspicious by the second, “well, because of the house.  I’ve just come from there myself.  It’s empty right now, so don’t worry about disturbing the owner, but I don’t think it’s quite used to meeting visitors.”

“Meeting...” Kurogane must have misunderstood what the traveller was saying.  Maybe it wasn’t his first language.  He looked too _other_ , too pale to be from anywhere within a hundred miles of Kurogane’s village, although he didn’t have any kind of noticeable foreign accent.

“Hmm.  Meeting anyone at all, I mean.” The man studied Kurogane seriously for a minute. “Still!” he went on, “on second thought, I’m nearly sure that it’s friendly.  You’d probably be all right there if it did rain.  But it won’t, so... I wouldn’t bother.  It doesn’t really rain much, usually.”

Kurogane glanced up at the blackening sky and then back down at—the traveller’s quickly retreating back because he hadn’t even taken his leave; he’d just left.  It was difficult to judge on such a short, strange conversation, but the man was probably insane. 

Either way, it was definitely going to rain and Kurogane decided he’d rather try his luck with the empty house than the empty road.

As soon as he’d closed the gate behind him, though, Kurogane realized that something besides that stranger’s questionable sanity was not quite right.  He latched the gate, and the wind died around him.  Behind him, outside of the ill-tended hedge, the road was splattered with the first drops of what was going to be a torrential downpour.  But on this side of the gate, the clouds were as dark as ever but the path up to the house’s old-fashioned porch was still dry.  The clap-shutters of one big picture window had been closed tightly; as Kurogane approached, they creaked open like a single, sideways eye.  When he put his hand on the banister, the porch swing shivered into motion. 

Kurogane hesitated.  Maybe he hadn’t heard that man wrong.  He’d never _met_ a building before, but this one was undoubtedly... aware of him.  He wasn’t idiot enough not to notice it. 

As he stood there, undecided, the shutters blinked again.  They were peeling unhappily around the edges, apparently unhappy to see _him personally_ , and so Kurogane scowled right back.  If the house didn’t want to meet him, well, that wasn’t his problem; he wasn’t one to be intimidated by a little bit of unfriendliness and he didn’t feel like getting wet.  A second set of shutters creaked.  He stomped across the porch, ignoring them.  The shingles rattled.  “What the hell are you looking at?” Kurogane grumbled, and toed the front door open.

There was no question that the house was unoccupied; the only sounds as Kurogane stepped inside were his own footsteps and a general sense of rustling motion that was probably the gaze of the building turning inwards to watch him.  It felt—not all that malevolent, but a bit like the house couldn’t make up its mind over whether Kurogane could be trusted.

Kurogane was very sure that he didn’t trust the house, so that was fine.

He tried the first few doors along the hall—a cluttered broom closet, a sitting room, a vast dining room with a heavy oak table completely covered in dusty jars—and settled on the big, farmhouse-style kitchen.  Not that Kurogane had any particular desire to go poking around, but he didn’t exactly want to stand like a lump in the hallway until the weather resolved itself, either.  The house couldn’t have been abandoned long; the paint was peeling and dust eddied in some of the corners, but all of the usual furniture was there and nothing seemed to be in real disrepair.  Even the running water in the kitchen sink worked just fine when Kurogane checked it.

It was a mess, though.  The traveller he’d nearly run into on the road must’ve used the empty kitchen to make himself lunch and then just abandoned all of his dishes in a pile instead of putting them away. Years of bakery work had trained Kurogane never to leave dishes to turn crusty and impossible to wash, so he did them himself, swearing under his breath the whole time.  Even if the house was abandoned, it just wasn’t right to let the plates sit piled there forever.   Especially not if the kitchen knew about it.

And the kitchen _definitely_ knew.  Kurogane didn’t even have to search around for where to put the plates after he’d dried them, because the house seemed to have decided that it liked Kurogane after all.  The right cupboards just opened on their own.

The whole thing was weirder than Kurogane would’ve wanted even if he had been fortune-seeking on purpose, and the weather still hadn’t broken by the time he’d finished setting the entire room straight.  He’d even scrubbed out the sink—not that it mattered to anyone except maybe the house itself—and the clouds were as black as ever but the garden path outside the kitchen window was still dry.  Tired of the sense that the entire mansion was breathing down the back of his neck, Kurogane resigned himself to chance it on walking home anyway.  It was probably a mistake to have wasted time doing the dishes in an empty kitchen.  It was certainly a mistake to have walked out here at all.  He scooped his father’s coat up and left much more quickly than he’d come in.

But the gate, when he got there, was stuck fast.  It was as if the nonexistent rain had rusted it shut, and no matter how much he rattled it, Kurogane couldn’t seem to make it budge.  Strange, though: it hadn’t even seemed sticky before.  He was going to have to go around through the hedge and it was going to be a pain in the ass—not that Kurogane would’ve minded taking the undignified route out except that he could feel the whole weight of the house watching him while he did it.  The fucking shutters were probably going to laugh at him.  Creakily.  Grumbling, he reached out to tug a few scraggly yew branches out of his way.   The hedge rustled, unresisting, and Kurogane moved to push himself through the prickly greenery.  If he ruined his father’s jacket because of this, it was going to be—

“ _Shit!_ ” Kurogane yanked back out, gaping.  The yew twisted under his hands and turned to viney roses that twined and bloomed in Kurogane’s fist.  He stared at the flushing red of the unfolding flowers, then back down at his bleeding fingertips.  Behind him, the house had gone quiet, not creaking at all.  Not laughing.

 Kurogane took a fast step backwards and felt his feet skid in dry gravel.

Past the hedge, where Kurogane could see the road through the slats in the gate, watery sunshine was just breaking through to shine on the puddles all along the road.  He could barely make it out, though, through the sudden, thorny thicket that had erupted where just a second ago there had only been some unhappy-looking shrubs.  The sky on this side of the roses still looked like thunder, as though the valley wasn’t even breathing. 

Barely breathing himself, Kurogane took off back towards the house.  The front door swung itself open before Kurogane could get to it this time—maybe it thought it was being welcoming.  Kurogane stormed straight through without stopping long enough to slam it, even, because there must be another way out.  There _had_ to be.

There was a back door and an impeccably cared-for vegetable garden and then masses of wildflowers that faded into grass that was more of a meadow than a vast lawn.  Beyond that there were the northern hills, looking as green as they did from Kurogane’s own back garden but much less remote.  Between the grass and the hills—was a sheer bank of cliffs that ran the full perimeter of the house’s little valley.  It was like the whole place existed in some impossible, forgotten crack in the otherwise orderly countryside.  Even the air felt forgotten, thick with roses and the ozone smell of the stillness before a storm.

Kurogane didn’t bother to go look closer.  If the house thought he was trapped, it probably knew better than he did.  It lived there. The fucking vegetable garden probably weeded itself.  Besides, it was going on a steely grey dusk out there and if Kurogane had to climb a hedge that was significantly cleverer than usual, he’d rather do it in daylight.

He stood in the open door and watched night leach the green out of the hills.

 

There were some apples and probably enough odds and ends in the kitchen for some kind of dinner—undoubtedly left behind by the same traveller who hadn’t done the dishes— but Kurogane didn’t particularly want anything to do with any of it.   He didn’t have the curiosity left in him to explore the mansion past that first hallway.  He refused to get involved with furniture that could possibly think for itself even if there probably _was_ a bedroom.  And so, feeling cornered and sulky about it because he refused to be _worried_ about it, Kurogane flung himself onto the floor of the front hall to wait it out.

The mansion settled creakily—and more than a little smugly—around him. 

Just when he’d almost dozed off in spite of everything, there was a fuzzy sort of dragging noise and Kurogane realized that the plush carpet runner was inching its way hopefully across the hardwood towards where he was sitting.   Kurogane scuffed his boot at it.  “Screw off.” The carpet dragged itself a little closer. “I mean it,” Kurogane hissed, “stay the hell over _there_.”  It stopped.  Kurogane dug his heels solidly into the oak flooring, propped himself against the cold wall, and went stubbornly to sleep.

When he woke up, he was still propped against the wall but he was a lot less cold.  Probably because he was snugly wrapped in the entire length of the carpet runner.  With a vicious curse, Kurogane kicked it off of his legs and bolted for the outside world.  The gate still wasn’t opening.  It wasn’t opening half an hour later, either, when Kurogane stopped hurling insults and kicking at it and came back inside.  The rug was still all piled up like it was fucking _hoping_ he’d sit on it, too.  So he did, as heavily as he could manage.

Around noon, someone new came in by the front door, caught sight of Kurogane still sitting there on the wadded-up hall rug, and tripped over his own feet.  Kurogane didn’t bother to stand up.  “Well,” he said once the man had regained his footing, “we’re probably both fucked now.”

“Um?” the stranger said, stupidly.  He was staring.  Fantastic.  Kurogane was trapped in a magical house with a complete moron.

“This house,” Kurogane said. “It’s evil.  It lets you in but not back out.”

“Are you... sure it won’t let you out?” the moron asked.  Presumably he wasn’t so stupid that he’d failed to notice on his way in that the house was somewhat alive.  “Because I’m a bit of a regular visitor, and I’ve never had any trouble with it.”

“I’m _very_ sure,” Kurogane growled. “I’ve been trying to leave since yesterday.  At least there’s food.”

“I see,” he said.  Now that Kurogane noticed, the moron had gone a little white around the mouth like maybe being trapped forever in some creepy-ass house wasn’t his idea of a good time, either.  He set his satchel down with a clink of—glass bottles?—of whatever was in it and hurried back outside.  Kurogane ambled out after him; he had nowhere better to be.

He made it out just in time to see the stranger standing, sort of frozen, at the gate.  At the unlatched, open gate.  The whole length of the hedge seemed to be made entirely of brilliant fuchsia roses now, and it had grown to be at least a dozen feet tall.  Their scent was so overpoweringly sweet that Kurogane thought maybe _that_ was what’d stopped the man.  Like maybe he was choking on it.

“Hey,” Kurogane said, “you look kinda—”

The man gave him one last terrified look and took off running.  Behind him, the gate thudded dully shut.

“ _Bastard_.” But Kurogane couldn’t blame him; he’d have run like hell too, if he could.

 

The bag that the traveller had abandoned turned out to be full of cold milk and beer in glass bottles and a whole loaf of crusty, warm-smelling sourdough bread.  Not what Kurogane would’ve chosen to take on a journey; still, he hadn’t eaten since yesterday’s wedding lunch and now wasn’t the time to look a gift dinner in the mouth. 

Afterwards, Kurogane began to go through the house for real.  He told himself that he was looking for a clue, or a key, or another way out.  The reality of the situation was that there was no way in hell Kurogane was getting out of that place until the place got tired of him and let him go, and he knew it.  He only hoped that happened before he ran out of food and starved to death—a fate which he vastly preferred to the idea of growing his own vegetables for sustenance.  Gardening suggested permanence.  It suggested more days spent like this one, wandering around dusty hallways while the greyish sunlight changed back into greyish twilight.

Kurogane eyed the hall carpet when he passed it, still waiting like an obedient puppy where he’d left it.  But his neck was stiff from sleeping hunched on the floor and Kurogane had found no fewer than five bedrooms so far, and he’d only been in one wing of the house.  Not to mention the fully stocked linen closet that swung open every time Kurogane stomped past.  The eighth time this happened, Kurogane thought, screw it _._

 He picked the biggest, most elaborate bedroom out of sheer spite, even though the king-size sheets for the huge old four-poster were stored at the back of the closet and actually _under_ the ancient sewing machine.  More accurately, Kurogane thought that they’d deliberately hidden themselves there, judging by how the house made him spend what felt like ten minutes rattling the doorknob before it let him back into the room.  The message was clear: Kurogane should choose any bedroom but this one, because this room had belonged to someone.  It made him perversely determined.

All the linens smelled like lavender tea in a way that pissed him off more than if they’d smelled like mildew.  They were crisp, and silky, and warm to the touch, and that sweet, herbal scent reminded him of something uncomfortable.  He couldn’t quite put his finger on what.  They _should’ve_ smelled like mildew.  The whole place should have been headed for rot, and nothing was.  Kurogane considered, as he yanked the old sheets off and replaced them with the ones he’d had to dig out so laboriously, whether this mattered to him or not. 

He decided that he didn’t care and anyway, this bedroom had the best view.

It also had more of a feeling of personality than Kurogane was entirely comfortable with, even more weirdly evident here than in the rest of the house.   There was no clutter, no shelves of knickknacks or piles of books collecting dust to tell Kurogane who had slept there—but there was no dust, either.  All the dust that covered the rest of the house had probably noticed that this room was already occupied and just not even bothered to show up.  The only real decorations were a vast oil painting of a snowscape that made Kurogane cold just to look at it, and a wardrobe made of some dark, exotic wood. 

Kurogane discovered that he had no desire whatsoever to open that wardrobe and learn whose clothes were in it.  He absolutely did not care.  No matter how much the rest of the house seemed to be begging for his attention, springing doors open and scraping curtains back every time he walked past, Kurogane only had to brush his fingers over the carved handle to know that this was not his to touch.  Still, as long as he left the wardrobe alone, he had no problems entering or leaving the room after that very first time when the door had fought him.  Three days later, when a stack of clothes that more-or-less fit him showed up out of nowhere on the armchair beside the window, Kurogane didn’t ask questions, and he sure as hell didn’t try to store them anywhere except neatly folded up on the chair.

On the nights after that, Kurogane found himself going to bed with the sunset out of sheer lack of a reason to stay up.  He lay as still and silent as possible in the huge bed that didn’t belong to him and tried to decide whether he was miserable or not.  Sometimes he even slept. 

Sometimes the house whispered so loud that it seemed like it was shouting at him, like there was someone _there_.  Those nights Kurogane didn’t get much sleep at all.

He’d explored every corner of the place by then.  It was like living in a museum, with everything at least a century old but still perfectly in place, still running.  All of the indoor plumbing worked, and the ancient claw-footed bath that adjoined to his bedroom ran as hot as Kurogane could’ve wanted it.  The ice box restocked itself twice a week with more food than Kurogane could have used himself, though the extras always somehow disappeared.  Once, Kurogane made himself a whole pot of beef stew only to find all the leftovers missing by morning.  He wondered if the house ate dinner.  Maybe that was how it sustained itself—on the stews of hapless travellers.  There was a fire in the library grate that burned constantly, completely indifferent to any attempt that Kurogane made to either stoke it or put it out. 

That library should have been Kurogane’s favourite room.  Instead, he hated it even more than he hated when the house stole his dinner, and he didn’t quite know why.  It had ancient, thick carpets and wide French doors that opened out to the best parts of the foggy garden, and what must have been tens of thousands of books shelved floor-to-ceiling and waiting to be read.  Kurogane had no interest in most of them—there was a fantastical collection of things that either bored him, like the ten-volume set of plant taxonomies, or pricked nervously at his animal instincts like the books full of magic spells—but he did read his way through the impeccably alphabetized collection of gothic novels.  Some of those weren’t half bad.  Tasteless, but at least they were interesting.  He always took them out and read them at the kitchen table, though, because he didn’t like the crawling, scratchy feeling that the library never lost, not even at midday. 

No sun could stream in from the mullioned windows to make the library less gloomy, either, because although it hadn’t rained once in the whole time Kurogane had been trapped there, the sky always looked exactly as if it was about to start pouring.   Even the harpsichord by the library window was broken and made no sound at all when Kurogane poked experimentally at its keys.  How long did you have to go without tuning an instrument before it actually went mute?  Tomoyo might’ve known the answer, but Kurogane had no idea.

The harpsichord in particular made him wonder who’d owned the house.  What kind of person left everything so lonely that it had tried to adopt Kurogane, of all people, as its new owner? 

Even so, it was harder than Kurogane had thought to be truly unhappy.  His father was fine without him, he knew, and Tomoyo was—Tomoyo was married, and also fine.  She’d probably spread it around the whole village by now that Kurogane had gone off treasure hunting or something equally terrible.  Even if they were worried—even if Kurogane was worried about _them_ —they were fine.  Kurogane was fine, too.  Bored and stir-crazy and maybe starting to talk out loud to an empty house despite the fact that it could almost definitely understand him.  But... fine.  He liked cleaning, sort of, or at least he was used to it, and he didn’t mind fixing the banister on the back stairs or the baseboards in the front sitting room.  He even spent a whole day trying to organize the disgusting jars in the dining room without looking too closely at what they contained, but he’d gotten up the next morning to find them all back precisely the way they’d been.  And when one of the dusty lumps in the broom cupboard turned out to be a sword instead of the mop he’d been looking for, practicing with that was something to do, too.  The blade wasn’t even rusted.  It felt almost as good in his hand as his father’s sword had and his body remembered all of the patterns like he’d never stopped.  Before he knew it, Kurogane was, as of course the house had intended all along, _involved_.

 

One day a week after he’d stopped bothering to check the gate in the mornings, Kurogane opened the back door to weed the garden—he had some radishes he’d been working on—and found dazzling summer sunlight.  As if that half-alive valley had never even heard of clouds.  Everything inside him lit with sudden and almost forgotten hope.

And then he heard the rain.  Vast, hissing sheets of it, pounding torrents of it, so much rain that the ugly cherub-encrusted fountain in the centre of the rose garden looked like it might drown.

Kurogane was known as the bravest boy in the village, growing up.  He was always the one nobody would purposely pick a fight with (except, that once only, the butcher’s oldest son).  He was the first one to brave swimming in the millpond every spring, when the ice was barely off it; the only one in fifth grade who’d actually kept the dare and stayed in Kinomoto-sensei’s haunted barn _all night_ ; the boy who would write to a wizard who didn’t necessarily exist if it seemed like there was no one else to ask.  There was no way in hell he was going to brave stepping out into that brilliant, cloudless downpour just for some radishes.

He turned straight around and went back to the kitchen, only to find someone standing at the counter with his shirt sleeves rolled up to expose skinny wrists, making sandwiches like an assembly line.  He looked maybe Kurogane’s own age or a little younger, and he was leaving a mess of crumbs and mustard smears all over Kurogane’s spotless cleaning.  His hair was dripping wet.  It was making his shirt wet.  Probably because it was raining outside.

“Oh,” the man said.  Kurogane didn’t say anything, just stared.  The man finished what he was doing and stared back for a while like he thought it was sort of an interesting game, before gesturing vaguely at the full plate behind him.  “I’ve made extra sandwiches, if you’d like one.  They’re corned beef.  It’s a local specialty, I’m told.”  And then, much too late for someone who’d just been caught breaking into someone else’s kitchen, he added, “I thought you were out.”

“Well, I wasn’t.”  Like that was even an excuse.  Like he could even _go_ anywhere.  Still, it was lunchtime and the man had at least offered to share, so Kurogane grabbed a sandwich and sat himself down at the table.  Not looking particularly repentant, the stranger pulled out a chair and joined him.

“Nice day if it doesn’t rain,” the man said, and giggled like he was cracked.

Kurogane just _looked_ at him.  They ate their way through the entire stack of corned beef sandwiches in dead silence after that.  Could’ve used more mustard, Kurogane thought.

 

The house must have been the only place that looked like viable shelter along the entire road—Kurogane lost track of the number of similar, increasingly strange, strangers who seemed to wander cautiously in and then quickly (once they discovered that the house was occupied) back out.  Kurogane could theoretically have stayed out of sight somewhere until they went on their way.  He might have preferred to, even.  But the house seemed to worry that he was bored.  It always flung open all the doors that Kurogane tried to close behind him, leaving him completely unable to hide even though he had an entire empty mansion in which to try to do it.  The whole thing was ridiculous and Kurogane wasn’t even that goddamn lonely, just trapped—and it wasn’t like the house was doing anything to fix _that_.

Rather than making Kurogane less bored, the parade of travellers only made him irritable and then viciously angry.  He was, it seemed, the _only_ person who was not allowed to leave.  And even when no one else was there, Kurogane couldn’t quite manage to be alone.  He tried, sometimes.  It might’ve been nice, since he really was trapped, to just lie down and feel completely sorry for himself once in a while.  But the house was always talking at him, in groans and scrapes and rattles. 

At least food continued to appear in the ice box twice a week, along with the sort of milk in glass bottles that they sold at the general store in town.  So, the house probably wasn’t evil; in fact, Kurogane got the impression that it was _fond_ of him.  He really, really wished that it wasn’t.  He also wished it would buy more beer sometime, before he got desperate and tried to distill something from his radishes.

And then it was the middle of summer without him ever noticing the change, and it was _hot_ at night, and, forget feeling sorry for himself, all Kurogane wanted was to walk out of that sealed gate and _go_.  Fuck however the house and anyone else might feel about it.  Fuck whatever price he had to pay to do it.  He was cornered and the house was restless and he couldn’t sleep worth shit because the bedroom door kept creaking ostentatiously open.  And there was no price he could pay and nothing he could try that he hadn’t already tried.

When roaring at the house to _just_ _stop it and leave him alone already_ didn’t work this time either, Kurogane gave up and lit a candle instead.

Thinking that maybe there was a book somewhere about nice, icy glaciers—or maybe a taxonomy of mosses so boring that even the heat couldn’t keep him awake if he tried to read it; who the hell needed to know about _moss_ —Kurogane followed the house’s bad mood down the stairs and to the threshold of the library.  He stopped there just long enough to realize that he’d never actually been in the library at night before and the horrible, oily feeling that that room gave him was ten times worse after dark, and then he stepped inside anyway.

His candle went out so fast that the wick didn’t even smoulder. 

Kurogane frowned—the big French doors weren’t open and so there shouldn’t have been a draft—and fumbled in his back pocket for matches.  The house didn’t usually screw with the lights, not unless it meant business.  But it must’ve really meant business tonight, because the match sure as hell wasn’t striking.  Not even a spark.

“It won’t work,” said no one at all from somewhere over by the fireplace.  Kurogane twitched so hard he almost fell over.

“Sorry! Sorry,” there was a rustle and a silhouette unfolded itself out of one of the huge wingback armchairs, “I... forgot that you probably didn’t know I was there.  But, lighting the candle won’t work.  It’s a curse.”  He shrugged, outlined in the faint embers of the fireplace that never went out.

“ _Shit_ ,” Kurogane swore, meaning it heartily.  “Thought you were the house talking to me.”

“Ha, no, the house doesn’t talk.  I’m almost sure.  It’s only me and the books here, anyway.”  The man motioned at a stack of books three feet high that had _not_ been on the floor yesterday; something about the neat arc of his wrist through the air itched at Kurogane’s memory.  Was he... reading in the dark?  Kurogane decided that he didn’t care.

“How do you know it’s a curse?” Kurogane asked instead of _what are you doing here?_  because it seemed like the more useful question.

“Well.”  The man seemed to consider his answer.  “Because it’s my curse, I suppose.  ‘No candle shall light, no bell shall ring...’  Pretty classic curse stuff, really.  Oh, that’s why the harpsichord doesn’t work either, in case you were curious.  The curse—my curse—keeps it from sounding.  It’s, ah, my library as well.  I don’t usually admit that but, given the circumstances, it probably doesn’t matter very much.”

Kurogane moved closer, into what little light there was.  “No candle lights and no bell sounds until... what?”  He was determined not to let this stranger talk him in circles, not when the bastard was being shifty and making Kurogane angrier than he felt like being in the middle of the night.  Not if some curse might’ve been doing god-knows-what to Kurogane all this time without him even noticing.

The man sighed and sat back down, staring into the glowing ash of the fire.  His face was hard to make out, weirdly etched in the strange lighting.  “Until the curse is broken, of course.  Or, maybe, until I am so forgotten that even I don’t try to light the candle anymore.  I’m not sure; it could happen.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“It’s a forgetting curse, Kuro-rin.  No one remembers me.  Not ever.”

“That’s not my name,” Kurogane gruffed, knee-jerk.  And then he stopped.  “But... you know my name.  We’ve met before?”

“Yes.  Oh, that’s probably remiss of me.” The man smiled, brightly and falsely, and stood again to extend a long-fingered hand with the kind of lovely manners that Kurogane’s mother had always taught him to respond to.  Kurogane took it and shook before he knew what he was doing.  Even in the warm room, his palm felt hot.  His skin prickled.  “It’s Fai.  I am... the wizard who owns your house.”

It was the first time that Kurogane had really been able to see him properly in all the shadows and firelight.  He was—not what Kurogane had expected, maybe.  Maybe older than he’d thought.  There was something electric about Fai, like those new lamps they sold in the hardware store that lit themselves.  Like there was something that Kurogane should know about him, something important.

Kurogane was too busy trying to figure out what the hell it _was_ to remember to drop Fai’s hand for probably a little bit too long.  “All the people I meet here, it’s always you, right?”

 “Of course it’s – of course. It’s only me.” Fai broke the handshake first and stepped back.

“Are you always this, um...?” Kurogane trailed off, not sure what he meant to ask, not sure if he thought Fai was ridiculous or kind of ultimately sad, or just appealing. Whichever way it was, he was sure that he resented it.

Fai twitched another crooked smile and looked very much like he wanted to sink into the dark and drown. “Very probably, yes. I am always... this.”

“And I don’t remember?”

“Yes.”

“I won’t remember this conversation?”

“Ah, no.  Frankly, most people don’t remember that they have spoken to anyone at all. You are a bit,” the wizard looked Kurogane over as if there was something he thought he was missing because of the bad lighting, “exceptional. I think.”

“Yeah.  I think your house likes me.”

Unexpectedly, Fai laughed and it sounded almost genuine.  Behind him, the fireplace snapped with sudden sparks.  “I have no doubt that it does. This house and I have been alone together for a long time.  For over a hundred years.  I’m afraid it’s gotten somewhat, ah, sentient.”

“Right.” Kurogane took a deep breath. “So, will you tell your stupid house to let me go, already?”

The wizard was silent for a long time before he answered.

“It’s strange, you know.  I almost wish that I could.”  Fai’s eyes in the dark were deep and fantastically cold, like thousand-year-old ice.  Kurogane wondered why he’d ever thought that they were light.

 

Weeks went by, and other things happened.  Fai played the silent harpsichord in the library for so long one day that Kurogane walked in and caught him at it.  Who the hell broke into someone’s house to pretend to play a broken instrument?  Kurogane woke the next morning suddenly knowing how to read music without knowing why.  There were scales and stupid drinking songs and whole sonatas with titles in languages that weren’t familiar, all crammed up inside his skull in a messy crescendo.  It certainly wasn’t Tomoyo he’d learned all _that_ from.  She would’ve been much neater about it.

A stranger walked into the kitchen a few days after that particular incident—what was about this house, that every traveller who passed seemed to decide that it was fine to just wander in and then back out, never to be seen again, while Kurogane stayed trapped?—stopped dead, and stared at Kurogane.  Well, Kurogane probably had flour in his hair or something.  Or it was the idiotic gold-trimmed apron, but it was the _only one_ , whoever lived here plainly lived their life completely in bad taste, and anyways the traveller likely thought that the stupid, run-down mansion was abandoned, whatever.  Kurogane offered him some orange-raisin-bran muffins without asking his name because he didn’t care to know it, and the man accepted with wary gratefulness. 

He even did the dishes before he left, which was quite a bit more thoughtful than all the others before him had been.

To prevent future mistakes of this kind, Kurogane began repainting the house with a weird, bright-mauve paint that he’d found in the hall closet.  He’d originally thought that there was only enough paint to touch up the front door and maybe some of the porch trim, just enough to stop things from looking so derelict.  Unfortunately, that particular shade stretched a lot farther than Kurogane had imagined it would.  By the time he’d finished both doors and all the shutters, not to mention the porch, and the banisters, and the trellises, and everything else besides, there was still half a can of paint left.  It looked good as new, Kurogane guessed, but he wished it hadn’t turned out so purple.  The overall effect was in even worse taste than the apron.  Like a mansion inhabited by a twelve-year-old girl, or maybe some kind of gay wizard.

The day after he finished painting, Kurogane was making the same muffins again (they were his favourite ones to bake, if he was bored enough to resort to baking) when yet another vagrant strolled in.  This one was blond, and sort of dashing against all of Kurogane’s attempts not to think so.  He poured Kurogane a cup of some hot, strange, too-sweet tea out of a flask he’d been carrying in his satchel, and said, with a smirk that took up half his idiot face, “Was the trim your idea? The place looks... lovely.”  So much for not being derelict; apparently, Kurogane now looked as if he lived at an inn.

He told Fai so, the next time Fai stopped by.

Fai went as white as Kurogane’s cake flour, gulped three times, and said, hoarsely, “What?”

“You’re a wizard or something, right? Can’t you magic it so that all these people stay the hell out of your house?”

The wizard gave a funny, twitchy kind of laugh.  “It is... my house, yes.  Kind of you to inform me.”  He shook his head like he was clearing it and went on in a much more normal voice.  Maybe he had a cold.  “If Kuro-wan says so, I can try my best.”

Kurogane glared, suspicious. “Yeah, I do say so.  And what the hell is with the names?  I don’t make fun of yours.”

“No,” Fai said after a second, “you usually don’t.”  He grimaced like one of them had made a terrible pun.  Kurogane didn’t think much of the wizard’s sense of humour, if that was as far as it went.

 

The next stranger who showed up knocked on Kurogane’s bedroom door just before dawn in the middle of that very same night.  And the strangest thing about him was his familiar, brilliant-lit eyes.  He seemed jittery, like he’d been travelling all night on purpose just to get there.  Half-awake, Kurogane shambled aside to let him in before he thought about what he was doing.  “I’ve met you before, huh?” he asked, trying to place the man. 

The stranger froze, silhouetted against the moon outside of Kurogane’s window.  It had been raining all week without letting up; it was still pouring.  The sky was crystal clear.  “Um.  Maybe?” He sounded nervous, and he was looking stiffly away from Kurogane’s searching gaze.

“You—” Kurogane hesitated, and the stranger turned to face him, all haloed in moonlight and strikingly young, and Kurogane was sure. “You were in the post office.  Once.  You gave me some paper.” He took a step forward, to look closer. “You look... I was eight, but you look _exactly_ the same.”

“I do.” The man said it defensively, as though Kurogane had accused him of something.

“You... were the wizard,” Kurogane said, slowly.  “You were _that_ wizard.” And then Kurogane realized what the accusation was and he was angry, instantly enraged like he hadn’t even known to be when he was barely nine.  So angry that he barely understood himself.  What should have been a hot emotion seemed to have gone hard and freezing cold sometime during the intervening years.  “And you knew.  You made a fool out of me,” he spat, working up momentum.  “You must have known.  You made me write out everything, but you looked at me and you _knew_ and you still—I was eight years old and there was no hope, and you couldn’t even _admit it to my face_.”

“Hah.  That wizard.  Right.” The sudden set of the wizard’s jaw said he’d spent all night resigning himself to exactly this fight. “Of course I am.  Of-fucking- _course_ it was me, of course it’s my fault.  You _wrote_ to me; you were probably the first person in fifteen years to write to me, because it’s getting _worse_ , and I—” he broke off and hissed through his teeth. And instead of backing off, he stalked towards Kurogane, just as angry.  Too angry even to raise his voice.  “And you were eight years old, and then you were fucking _sixteen_ , and I was—I was—” He was inches from Kurogane’s face, they were both breathing too fast, and Kurogane was distantly afraid that the wizard might bite.  Kurogane would probably end up punching him if he did.  He got the feeling that might’ve been a bad idea.

Instead, the wizard turned with a swirl of his huge coat and walked to the windowsill.  Kurogane was only wearing cotton sleep pants and nothing else, but the wizard had miles of white winter fur.  “You know, Kuro-sama, this is actually still my bedroom,” he said, suddenly and icily calm.

“Don’t—” Kurogane strode forward and yanked the wizard around to face him, not caring that he smashed the back of his head against the windowpane.  The wizard’s blue eyes went shocked and wide, reflecting nothing.  “Do. Not. _Call_ me that,” Kurogane spat.

His hands were on the wizard’s shoulders anyway, pinning him to the nighttime glass, and it was more satisfying to just keep shoving forward than it was to pull away.  Easier to just keep shoving everything aside, and so Kurogane kissed him on the mouth hard enough to hurt at least a little.

He hadn’t necessarily expected the wizard to kiss him back.

But he did. He froze up against Kurogane’s hands and let out a shuddery breath that was probably sheer outrage, and then he really did bite Kurogane, deliberately, on the lip so that Kurogane tasted hot blood.  Kurogane hadn’t considered that stepping in so close might’ve been a mistake.  And then the wizard— _Fai_ , Kurogane’s jerky, furious brain supplied, _Fai_ and something about dish suds and purple and hot, honeyed tea—then Fai softened, like he was giving something up.  Stupidly, suddenly, there was nothing at all in Kurogane’s head except ringing static.  The inside of Fai’s mouth was _wet_.

Fai shifted, his fingers hard in Kurogane’s hair and soft against his jaw.  He let Fai tease him carelessly closer, not caring if that was what Fai meant to do or not, and Fai spread out obligingly to make room.  With his eyes closed, it didn’t feel like the mistake it should’ve been.  It felt like summertime flowers and delicate winter frost and tree-climbing and things that Kurogane hadn’t remembered about in a long, long time—

And everything went sliding suddenly sideways, not in a good way, and Kurogane got it.

Fai kissed like he was trying to show Kurogane something vastly important, something Kurogane probably didn’t want to know.  But what Kurogane saw instead was all the workings and unworkings of a curse.  A thing like a wrought iron gate, so strong and old and senseless and curiously simple that Fai himself seemed very small beneath its weight.

Kurogane jerked back just enough to _look_ at Fai without letting the wizard out of anything that Kurogane didn’t really intend to stop.  Fai made a breathless, questioning kind of noise—and maybe he was running on static and nothing at all as much as Kurogane was—but Kurogane ignored the question with a shake of his head.  He wasn’t really looking at Fai; he couldn’t see him.  All he could see was the spell.  It wasn’t a complicated trap that Fai had stepped in, much less complicated than the life-and-death give-and-take of his father’s swords.  It was just—the wrong book, a cursed book, a mindless and vindictive enchantment so that whoever read it and then left it behind would be—

Forgotten.  Excommunicated.  Slowly, and then faster and faster until no one remembered at all.

He wanted to tell Fai to _be careful_ , not to be so stupid next time, to watch what he did because magic was dangerous.  But it was useless to say what Fai already knew.  Fai was a wizard with an enormous library; he probably had hundreds of cursed books.  Thousands of them.  Probably collected them on purpose because he was a blundering idiot.  And he just hadn’t been careful enough, just once, and so.  And now.

Kurogane was sick of the whole thing.  Sick of cursed places and lonely houses and magic that he hadn’t asked to be involved in.  Sick of Fai, who owned the house, who was Kurogane’s wizard, who was _that_ wizard, who was stupid and careless and made Kurogane forget and then showed up in Kurogane’s bedroom, which was Fai’s room anyways, _goddamnit_ , and made Kurogane want.  Who was still waiting there as patiently as if he was going to just _let_ Kurogane want, which was worse.

Mostly, he wanted to be rid of Fai forever.  More than that, he wanted to not hear whatever the hell the wizard was going to say about it.  So Kurogane shoved him back again, rushing, and ended up sprawled all over the windowsill and the cold glass and Fai. 

Fai who was much warmer than all that fur coat in the middle of summer would suggest.

Pushed past the point of inaction, Fai touched Kurogane like he couldn’t help it but he desperately wanted help in stopping.  Like he wanted to touch Kurogane absolutely everywhere but sometime during the pause he’d started thinking again and now he was trying so hard, for some reason, to be _good_.  Hot, quick fingertips against the back of Kurogane’s ear, the inside of his elbow, a thumb that slid snowflake-soft along the undefended place under his lowest rib.  It was making Kurogane gasp.   But it was also making him goddamn impatient, because Kurogane didn’t want _good_.  He wanted _better_.  He wanted, more than anything, to find out what, precisely, unfairly, definitely deliberately, Fai was holding back.

He reached for Fai, not even half satisfied with grabbing at nothing but coat and even more fucking coat when just the barest careful brush of Fai’s hand was such a revelation.  He wanted equal footing.  He wanted more.  But Fai was wearing what felt like three different belts and Kurogane wasn’t looking at what he was doing, so he fumbled.

“Don’t.” Fai caught him by the wrist, hard, with fingers that hurt.

Kurogane squinted at him, pissed right the fuck off.  Not that he’d ever done this before, but Kurogane was pretty sure that, well.  That.

“I’m not—I won’t—” Fai smiled with the closest thing to an apology that Kurogane could imagine him being capable of, but there was something vast and shockingly bleak behind his eyes.  When he loosened his grip, his whole hand was shaking. “You’ll forget, Kuro-mi, and you’ve never... Well.  And I _couldn’t_.”

And then Kurogane wished they weren’t touching at all, because what the hell, was he really that obvious, and was Fai really going to be stubborn over some idiotic idea of Kurogane’s maidenly virtue or some fucking thing when really, when obviously—when Kurogane had been _waiting_ , and he wasn’t some girl who cared if he remembered his first time, _Jesus_ , and.  Oh. 

And Fai was smiling that ugly, blank smile, but there was nothing blank about him, nothing except the huge blank space of no one remembering him, not ever, no matter how patiently he waited or how long he _wanted._  So of course Kurogane was making a mistake.  He’d known it was a mistake; he’d been sure of it; he’d been right, but he hadn’t remembered.  It didn’t matter what Kurogane would forget.  It only mattered that Fai couldn’t.  And maybe it might’ve mattered what, exactly, Kurogane had been waiting _for_ , except that it didn’t fucking matter at all.

Fai would let him want and nothing else because when Fai walked out of his bedroom door, Kurogane wouldn’t even remember what he’d wanted in the first place.

Kurogane pulled back, and stepped back, and sat back on the bed.  “How long will you stay like this?”

“If no one breaks the curse?” Fai scoffed like he’d just told the world’s least funny joke and was bored by it.  “Forever.  Well.  Forever until I lose patience and end it one way or another, I suppose.  I don’t know if it _could_ end that way, though, really.  I’m not sure that it’s physically possible.  I haven’t even aged since—well, but apparently you can see that for yourself.”

“Tch.”  Kurogane brushed that bit of self-pity aside.  If there was anyone he felt bad for in this situation it was himself, held hostage and evidently denied even this most basic of compensations.  Should’ve married the butcher’s daughter.  Or _—_ he watched Fai carefully, as still and unreal now as if he’d been carved from frost and gilt _—_ maybe the butcher’s son.“And how long‘ve you been here?”

“A hundred years.  Give or take.  We’ve had this conversation before, you know.”

“Yeah, whatever, so we’re having it again.  And you don’t know which book cursed you?”

“No, I—” Fai stared, the frozen-over look replaced by terror.  “Why do you know about that? _How_ do you know about that?”

“Because you showed me.”  All annoyance aside, Kurogane was strangely embarrassed.  “Doesn’t matter how; it’s—I’m not a moron. I can tell.”

“I... showed you.  Right.  Because you learn things by seeing them done.” Fai giggled in the kind of fractured way that didn’t actually suggest he’d stop being terrified.   Well, that wasn’t quite what Kurogane meant, but it was true that he could almost _feel_ the scrollwork of that curse working into him if he held himself just right, it was suddenly so clear: an ugly, smudgy, rusty feeling that stretched over Fai and the window glass and everything else in a crawling scrawl.  Fai pulled his fuzzy collar up tighter around his throat and it occurred to Kurogane that this was another mistake.  The wizard probably hadn’t meant for him to see anything at all.  “You did tell me that, once.”

Kurogane didn’t remember that conversation, if it had even really happened.  “Which _book_ , wizard?”

“I don’t remember.  I can’t remember.  Obviously.  Really, Kuro-rin, there’s no point; you’ll only forget...”

“If you’re gonna be this useless, just get out.” Kurogane was tired, and he was frustrated, damn it, and he probably had things to think about that weren’t the way that everything about Fai was sort of silver and sad and dangerous-looking in the moonlight.  In his bedroom.

He’d thought that Fai might protest, but Fai just looked at him for a second like he was measuring (or maybe memorizing), and nodded tightly, and went.  At the door, he paused without turning back.  “I was—really very sorry to hear about your mother.”

“Yeah,” Kurogane said, “I know.” It was a mistake again; he’d meant to say, _Thanks_.

 

The next day, Kurogane woke up uncharacteristically late and with the certainty that there was a book he had to read.  He had no idea which book it was.  That was strange, but not as strange as the fact that when he went down to the kitchen, the house seemed to have left him a strawberry shortcake for breakfast and an accompanying note that read, _I can bake too, you know_.  Kurogane ended up eating the whole, fluffy thing.  It was sweeter than he’d prefer, which was the simple reason that Kurogane rarely baked just for himself, but goddamn if it wasn’t _good_. 

He finished the last piece sitting on the library floor, surrounded by the entire spread-out contents of the huge bookshelf closest to the door—braving the glowers of the emptied shelves, which he could feel pressing into him, promising ugly revenge on any icing smears.  There was some reason, irritating and insistent but impossible to pin down, that he had to start this soon.  Now.

Halfway through the morning Fai rushed in, hurrying and trying to look like he wasn’t. 

“Oh, right.” That was why.  Kurogane nodded at him sullenly and all of a sudden had to try as hard as he’d ever tried at math class or anything else, ever, to remember a single thing that wasn’t the searing slide of Fai’s palm across his breastbone.

“Whoops,” Fai said, dumbly, and very obviously pretended that he’d been leaving all along.  “I’ll just be... um.”

“Don’t be an idiot.  I’m in here because I know.”

“You... know that I was just looking for a shortcut to that lake over there? And now that I’ve, ah, found the lake, I’ll be on my way? To the lake?”

“No, I know that you read a cursed book and now,” Kurogane dredged through the stupidly murky depths of his brain; _God_ , but it wasn’t easy to fight this thing, even when he knew exactly how it worked.  Like a door slammed shut and locked tight.  He read it out anyway, a recitation of what was written in the grime that Kurogane couldn’t quite seem to scrub out of any of the corners: “No candle will light, no bell will sound and... no one remembers you.  Until someone reads the book again.  Someone who isn’t you.  Also, it’s obviously faster to go around outside by the path.  Anyone would’ve noticed.”

Fai spun around so fast that it hurt Kurogane’s neck to see it.  “You—”

“Yeah, I remember you, wizard. Now that you’re standing _right there_.”  It was sort of satisfying to prove Fai’s fatalism wrong.  “I’m probably just immune to your shitty lies.  It’s exposure; your house always remembers you, too.”

For a remarkably long time, Fai didn’t say anything at all.  Long enough for Kurogane to pick up what had to be his fiftieth book of the day and start working his way through it, and then have to yank himself back out to look up at where Fai was still just standing like a lump in the middle of the parquet, asking a hesitant question:  “Um, Kuro-tan, you know that it’s magic, right?”

Kurogane rolled his eyes and went back to scanning.  “Well, I didn’t think the house got that way on its own.”

“No, ah, you.  You know that _you_ have magic.  Don’t you?” As if the wizard thought that this might somehow be news.  He was probably trying to be sensitive, to go with his purple taste in exterior decorating.

“If you’re gonna keep acting like a moron, will you just leave?  I’m busy. And I’ve known it was magic since I was nine.”  He snorted.  “Like I’d learn to make cupcakes _on purpose_.”

Kurogane had been—acting pretty stupid himself, probably.  Maybe for a long time.  Weeks and weeks where he could’ve been fighting and he hadn’t even noticed that there was a battle going on.  Maybe years and years.

He put the book aside, finished, and turned back to Fai, only to discover that the bastard was _laughing_.

 

Things went on like this for a while, for days on end, until it seemed like it had been this way forever.  There was a house, and a kitchen, and a library, and a bedroom where Kurogane could never quite sleep as well as if he’d been truly alone.  Kurogane lived there by himself as he had done for some time, and if he sometimes talked out loud to the stairway or the closet door, that was just because he was quite certain that they knew what he was saying to them and they’d probably pissed him off.  That didn’t mean he wanted anyone to just _barge in_ to his library.

Because Kurogane was reading books to end a curse, which was very important and had to be done as soon as possible, and frankly, he didn’t appreciate all the interruptions. The more people who interrupted him, the longer he was going to have to spend in the library.  He hated that piece-of-shit library, for reasons that were sometimes nebulous and sometimes very clear, but he went back every day regardless.  Luckily, he didn’t exactly have to _read_ every single book, just page through them until he found the one that he was looking for.  Whichever one that might be.  But he still had more than half a library to go, and it wasn’t going to flip through itself. 

Apparently, the man who strolled in and sat down cross-legged on the floor across from Kurogane didn’t care. “Any luck?” the stranger inquired, perfectly friendly.  Kurogane’s hackles rose.

“The hell would you know about it?” he snapped. “It’s my... curse. _Oh_.”

“Oh?”

It was Fai, of course it was fucking Fai because who the fucking fuck _else_ would it be, there was _no one else_ , and Kurogane was going to kick himself in the balls.

“Hah, yes.” Fai smiled, primly, and handed Kurogane a mug of spicy black tea.  Barely any milk and no sugar, exactly the way Kurogane liked it.  He could’ve sworn that Fai had been empty-handed.  “I think you’ll find it’s _my_ curse that you’re looking for.  In _my_ library.  So.  Any luck?”

No, Kurogane could safely say that he had not been having very much luck at all.  He wondered how Fai took his tea, and if maybe he already knew how Fai liked his tea and had just forgotten.  He wondered how many damn books one library could hold.

 

So sometimes Kurogane sat in one of the huge armchairs and scanned through page after page, alone, for hours, as many books as possible while they piled up around his feet.  Sometimes someone would wander in and watch him read without offering to help, until Kurogane got pissed off and shouted him out of the room.  And sometimes Kurogane sat on the floor in whatever watered-down sunlight could be bothered to drip in through the clouds and the person who stretched out across from him was Fai, who always said he’d come because he was bored but never really did anything to interrupt Kurogane’s work.

Rarely, there would be books that Kurogane thought had promise.  Something to do with the way they felt.  If Fai was there, he always seemed to know it too, gaze going from aimless, deliberately vague as if he really was bored enough to watch Kurogane read, to sharp and almost luminous in a way that reminded Kurogane of... something.  Some _one_ , maybe.  But it was never the right book, and anyway Kurogane could never quite pin down who he was thinking of.

Slowly, the books Kurogane had read began to outnumber the books he hadn’t.

Somewhere just after that halfway point, Kurogane caught himself sitting alone and for once wishing that Fai _was_ there.  Usually, it was a relief to work uninterrupted, but today he was grudgingly willing to admit that he wanted a second opinion.  Because sometimes books seemed promising, and sometimes books seemed dangerous; this one, though, was neither.  And it certainly wasn’t ordinary. It radiated—nothing.  No whispers of past readings, no hint of intent, nothing.  If Fai had been anywhere in the library, Kurogane could have judged without asking, just based on the sharpness of Fai’s attention, what that meant. 

But Fai was nowhere at all, so Kurogane picked the book up warily and immediately, itchingly, _wanted_ to read it.  No title was in evidence; there was nothing on the cover or the spine to explain what drew him in.  The frontispiece, though, was beautiful.  All done in blue-white scrollwork that seemed to twine as he looked at it.  Vines that might burst into bloom at any moment, cool waves on some overcast lake, hoarfrost creeping over ice...

Someone struck Kurogane hard across the face.

"What?" he grunted.  "What, who?"

The man staring down at him (how did he get on the floor?) had eyes the same ice blue as Kurogane's dream. 

"Who the hell are you?" Kurogane sat up as quickly as he could manage while he was trying very hard to look like he'd meant to lie down at all.  Everything inside his skull sloshed together sickly.  Maybe it was a concussion.

" _Who_?" Kurogane's assailant blanched, like he'd only just realized that his fingers were still resting where they'd landed against Kurogane's cheek in a way that didn’t sting at all anymore.  He snatched his hand back hotly.  "It doesn't fucking matter _who_ , just--" He scrambled to his feet.  It made Kurogane dizzy just to look up at him.  It was a long way up.  He looked pale, frozen around the mouth, furious or terrified or both, and that reminded Kurogane of the frost dream as well.

"Just watch what you fucking read, Kuro-sama.  These books aren't yours.  Nothing in this place has ever been _yours_.”

He took one panicked step backwards and then he wasn't there anymore.  Not like he'd disappeared or winked out or snapped his fingers and gone somewhere else, but like he'd never been there at all.  Even the still, stagnant pause of the library forgot him like he didn’t exist.

Once his head cleared, Kurogane shoved that particular book away very carefully with the toe of his boot, without looking at it.  He knew, he supposed, that Fai was a wizard.  That Fai had magic, and much more of it than anyone Kurogane had ever met—had to have, to have survived for so long on nothing else.  He hadn't really thought about what that meant before.  Afterwards, Kurogane didn’t necessarily remember thinking about it at all.  It didn’t make much of a difference.

 

Tens of thousands of novels and spell books and recipes and dictionaries later, Kurogane walked into the library early, knowing just as he had for the last three weeks that there was a book he had to read.  For the first time in at least three days, he even knew exactly _why_ he had to read it, and for whom.  Strangely, the only thing this knowledge made him feel was tired. 

It was the last shelf.  The very last set of eight hundred books, give or take a few: Kurogane knew from tedious experience exactly how many books each huge bank of shelves held, exactly how many such shelves were in Fai’s library.  If it wouldn’t have been so damn depressing, he could’ve multiplied them together and known almost exactly how many books that was in total that weren’t the right book.  He didn’t really care about the answer anymore.  His head hurt just from thinking about it and there was a cold feeling in his gut because there were so few books left, less than a day’s worth of searching, and what if it just wasn’t there?

He’d fucking look again, is what, but still.

Whatever Kurogane was feeling, Fai was worse.  Kurogane came in barely after first light to find him already at the harpsichord, playing a violent series of ragged, off-tune, completely silent arpeggios.  He looked like he’d been there all night.  But at the sound of Kurogane’s footsteps, Fai broke off abruptly and slammed out through the French doors without looking back. The air in the library felt even more venomous than usual in his wake.

After half an hour, Fai came back in quietly by the more usual door, carrying two bowls of hot oatmeal.  It was brimming with cream and cinnamon and not too much honey and smelled like it had been made by someone with about a hundred years of practice at making truly excellent breakfasts.  Part of the ache in Kurogane’s stomach was probably hunger.  He hadn’t even noticed.  Fai set one of the bowls down in front of Kurogane like he meant it as some kind of apology.  He didn’t really owe Kurogane anything at all, though, so Kurogane grunted an ungrateful, “Thanks,” picked the bowl up, and followed him across to the windows.  They ate standing side by side like that, staring out as the sun rose brilliant over the hills and a dead rain pounded the long grasses flat.

“Weird weather you have here, wizard.”

“Hmm.”  Fai was far away, and Kurogane had to swallow down the stupidest urge to touch him, to call him back.  To just stand closer and see if he could save Fai through sheer proximity.  He had this one idiotic, floppy piece of hair that was always sliding into his face, and it made Fai look much softer than he really was.  He wasn’t—accessible, like this.  This wasn’t going to work, but Kurogane was standing close enough anyway; he didn’t have to lean very far to brush shoulders solidly with Fai and feel how tensely he was held in place.  Fai always held himself so still when he thought no one was looking at him and it made him seem like he should be cold to the touch.  He never was.

 Fai startled and jerked back too fast, then made like he hadn’t moved at all.  “Ah.  Ahaha.  Shouldn’t you be reading?”

Kurogane held Fai’s gaze flatly for a very long time but, yes, it was true, he should be reading.  So he turned back to that day’s stack of books, the very last stack that there was, and got to it.

Barely ten books into the pile, Kurogane felt Fai watching him again.  With the air of someone who’d waited until far too late, Fai asked, “How will you know which one’s the right book?”

Kurogane shrugged. “I’ll recognize the curse on it.”

“Ah, yes,” Fai said meekly. “How stupid of me; of course you will.”

“Are you doubting me, wizard?”

Fai watched him, unblinking.  Hoarfrost creeping over ice.  “No,” he said, “that’s the worst thing about it.  I believe you completely.”

He didn’t even bother to try the blank smile on before he walked back out into the rain.

 

Kurogane knew before he picked up the last book that it wasn’t the right one.  It was one of Fai’s dumb, fluffy novels; he’d read it months ago and thought that the heroine could’ve solved the whole thing in five minutes just by showing some guts.  He read it again anyway, page by page, more thoroughly than he’d read anything in weeks, just in case, and then he dropped it on the floor and left it there.  Fai was nowhere to be seen and the house, more and more often for the past few weeks, had nothing to say about it.

He walked up to the stupid, voiceless harpsichord and slammed his fist into its keys.  _No bell will ring_.  It was a beautiful thing, elegant and old, and Kurogane hoped that the force of the blow would crack it straight in half.

But there was no crunch of splintered wood or twang of broken strings.  No noise at all.  When Kurogane thought about Fai’s hundreds of terrible novels, Fai up to his elbows in dish soap, Fai in the morning light, playing as diligently as if it mattered even though the keys never made a sound, he went suddenly weak-kneed with relief and had to slump onto the bench.  Because he might’ve broken Fai’s fucking _useless_ harpsichord and never remembered to refuse to apologize.  

He might wake up tomorrow and not remember to—

What if he’d forgotten something?  What if there was some shelf Kurogane had missed, some place he’d thought he’d searched but he’d _forgotten_ —

There wasn’t.  Kurogane knew it.  He remembered, specifically, searching every single shelf.  He remembered which treatises had looked the most boring and which books had been so malevolent he’d dropped them without opening their covers— _evil_ , Fai had said about the worst of them, _but not the right kind of_ _evil_ —and he knew there was nothing he’d missed.  He’d been in all the rooms of the house a thousand times.  He’d used every cookbook in the kitchen, and he knew for sure that Fai kept no books in his bedroom because Fai’s bedroom was where Kurogane had been sleeping for months.

For the first time, it occurred to Kurogane to wonder where _Fai_ had been sleeping since he’d stolen the wizard’s bed.

Maybe Fai didn’t sleep at all.  Maybe Fai had spent every night for a hundred years reading futilely in the dark library.  Maybe Kurogane would wake up in the morning and have forgotten every terrible thing, every awful instance of Fai being in his life, and Fai’s house would hate him for it and let him go, and he could go back to the village and become the baker he was always supposed to be.  He dropped his head onto the pile of sheet music that was absolutely useless with an instrument that _didn’t fucking work_ , and closed his eyes.

 

Kurogane woke to the sound of still more rain, with the greyest, most horrible headache of his entire life.  A musty hymnal was stuck to the side of his face.  He honestly could not tell if he’d slept for only five minutes or straight through the night and into the next afternoon.   _Shit_.  He needed to find Fai. Radiant sunlight poured into the library, exacerbating the disgusting lumpiness settled in behind his eyes, and Kurogane didn’t think that this shitty backwards weather was funny at all anymore.

He peeled himself off of the sweat-stuck parchment and debated whether or not to just throw the whole thing in the fireplace.  It oozed out the same kind of slimy feeling that the whole library was always seeping with, only worse.  He let it slide out of his fingers, disgusted with everything. Fai had to know already.  There was nothing to tell, no reason to find him.  He’d—

It was _exactly_ the same feeling; rusty, wet iron in the dark, something glacial and awful and sad.  He recognized that feeling.   Kurogane snatched the parchment back up almost frantically, afraid he’d imagined it.  But he knew.  It was the feeling of something left alone too long to go wrong all by itself, like old, rotting ice or corroding metal or Fai’s stupid, lonely house—or like a forgotten hymn in a minor key.  A hymn in Fai’s library that Kurogane didn’t know, and it was Fai who played the silent harpsichord in the middle of the night.  It was Fai who’d taught Kurogane to read music just by sitting down and doing it.  Who’d taught Kurogane every piece of music he knew, all at once.  Of course it was.  It was always Fai.

He put the hymnal down again, carefully this time, and it held its page without Kurogane even having to touch it.  It was difficult to read, hard to look at like a trick of the light, but it wasn’t a trick.  It was double vision, the notes of the hymn and the open wounds of the curse all tangled together on the page.  This was what had been hiding alone in the dark, waiting and fearing and loathing to be remembered.  Not a book at all—a piece of music.  But Kurogane could read it.  He could read it and break the curse.

When Kurogane pressed the first note, it sounded, perfectly in tune.  Six bars in, Fai came _running_.

Kurogane didn’t stop playing, even when every candle in the room lit itself at once.  He didn’t move even though the air convulsed around him, didn’t pause until all the notes had run themselves out in a sweet, sad rush and left the room empty except for a smell of rust and ozone.    Until the air seemed to thin out and become suddenly breathable again. 

The click when Kurogane shut the harpsichord’s lid echoed in the sudden space and—really, finally sure that the thing was done—Kurogane let himself turn around.  Fai stood looking so white that Kurogane might’ve been worried that he’d actually died and forgotten to fall over.  He was breathing, though; huge, scraping gasps that made his shoulders heave.

“Well,” Kurogane said, slouching back against the closed keyboard.  He aimed for a nonchalant smirk, but something embarrassingly giddier might have slipped through.  “You going to thank me?”

“Thank you,” Fai said, formal and sick-sounding.  He didn’t move.

Kurogane lurched to his feet.  That was wrong.  “I didn’t do it for your thanks, wizard.”

“Nevertheless.”  Fai was clutching a wooden spoon in one hand, forgotten.  He’d been cooking?  He could cook.  He’d baked Kurogane a cake once.  Made him sandwiches and tea and stew and breakfast and a hundred other things. “I am grateful to you.”

 “Are you—” Kurogane broke off.  This wasn’t the right conversation.  He’d had the spare time to read all those fucking novels; he knew exactly how this scene was supposed to go. Fai should’ve known too.  “I know you, I know you’re stupid, but are you honestly _this stupid_?  I’ve tried, I’ve been trying, to—”

“Stop!” Fai _snarled_ , jaggedly enough to cut straight through any terrible, wrong confession that Kurogane might have been trying to make. 

“Sorry.”  Fai held the spoon up like it could hold Kurogane off.  Somehow, Kurogane had gotten much too close—close enough to shake Fai until he dropped the stupid spoon, if that would’ve helped.  “I’m sorry, Kuro-rin. But please just, I’m all right, it’s all right, so you can.  You can just stop now. You can go.” Fai snatched a fast, shaky breath; his voice was very level when he continued. “Please.”

Kurogane stared, he could feel himself staring and it was awful, and then he took a step back into the shivering cold that was everywhere that Fai wasn’t.  Because he honestly hadn’t thought about what to do if.

“If that’s what you want,” Kurogane said, and he didn’t even remember moving his mouth to say it.  He remembered Fai, shaking in the dark: _I couldn’t_.

“Thank you,” Fai breathed.  And Kurogane—went.

 

The roses in the hedge were taller than ever but finished and faded, shedding pale petals all over the path like they were dreaming of how it had felt to be a yew tree.  The gate was a mass of red rust.  It still wouldn’t open until Kurogane kicked at it, and when he did it fell straight off its crusted-up hinges into the gravel without even a protesting creak.  If it had been this easy months ago—if it had been this easy, then, Kurogane would have left still wearing his father’s best suit jacket. 

“ _Shit_.”  Kurogane yanked viciously at the hedge and got a gash across his palm for the trouble. 

The gate was finally open, the road was there—an easy thing to walk out and follow it home, or to take it in the other direction and never go home at all.  But that didn’t change one fucking thing about the situation.  There was no way for Kurogane to leave.

 

It was strange to turn around and walk back through that purple door and have it not make a sound when he entered.  Kurogane had to push it open himself, and he hadn’t had to do that since the very first time.  Strange to walk into that kitchen that always smelled exactly like his father’s bakery, when he knew the gate was standing open at his back and he could just step through it and be home.  It was even stranger to walk in and see Fai standing there and remember him, _really_ remember him.

Fai stared.  It hadn’t even been five minutes.  He still had the spoon.

“I was making muffins,” he said.

“What?”

“Those muffins, you know, the ones you always bake.  With the raisins.  Because I knew it didn’t work, you didn’t break the curse yesterday, and I thought—the house would probably let you go now, so I’d give you something for the.  Um.  For the road.  Then you did break it, of course, and,” Fai swallowed visibly, “I got distracted and I think I left the batter alone for too long.  It’s gone all lumpy, see?”

Fai tilted the bowl so Kurogane could see, sort of helplessly, like he knew perfectly well that no one gave a damn about the muffin batter but he didn’t know what else to do.

Kurogane didn’t know what the hell to do either.  “I don’t even like muffins.”

“But you always make these muffins.”  Fai prodded at the soggy mess with his spoon, making it unsolvably worse.

“No shit, I always make them.”  It was true; they really were Kurogane’s favourites to make, and now that he actually knew why, it was terrible.  “I always make them, probably because you _always fucking show up when I do_.”

“Oh.”  Fai blinked as though this had honestly never once in his damn life occurred to him.

“Yeah, _oh_.  Every Saturday since I was nine years old.  Came from two towns over, my ass.  And I just _forgot_.  _Shit_.”

“Well.”  Fai hadn’t lost that awful half-stunned look, but he’d put the bowl down and he was edging around to Kurogane’s side of the kitchen table like maybe he didn’t even know he was doing it, which was an improvement.  Whatever his motives were, it brought him into punching range.  “I _do_ like muffins.  As it happens.”

“You—” Kurogane stopped, let out his breath on a growl, and didn’t actually hit Fai at all.  “I forgot you every goddamn time, you son of a _bitch_ , and you never told me, and then you _told me to get out_.  And you—”  He pulled up short mid-rant, because that wasn’t the only thing he suddenly remembered about Fai.  “That was you, when I was sixteen, with the sword, and you.  You said.”

 Fai smiled, or at least tried out some miserable facsimile of the expression.  All of his smiles were miserable, every single smile Kurogane had ever seen.  “Yes, exactly.  I said.  And, _God_ , I _thought_.  You have—” He laughed mirthlessly, gently. “You have honestly no idea, have you? Because I _know_ I was the first person you ever kissed.  You were half naked, you know.”

“When I... kissed you?  I know.”

“No.” Fai’s flat expression turned sharp. “When you were sixteen, with the sword.  But I’d have let you smash my head against the wall and kiss me then, too.  And I’d have deserved all the bruises.”

Ah.  Somewhere the terrifying labyrinth of Fai’s thick skull, that was probably even true.  Kurogane stepped forward and Fai skidded back.  It was kind of funny to watch the absolute panic in Fai’s face when he ran up against the kitchen table and couldn’t retreat anymore, except that Kurogane was so sick of it he could have ripped the table in two with his bare hands.

“Well, then don’t fucking chicken out now.”

“I—You—” Fai _blushed_.  It was the absolute stupidest thing.

What the hell had he _thought_ Kurogane was going to say about it?  It wasn’t like he’d been any kind of unclear.  He hadn’t even known who Fai was half the time and even that hadn’t been enough to stop Kurogane from acting like the most obvious goddamn fool in the world over him. 

This wasn’t working.  It couldn’t. 

Everything was going sideways and wrong and _not how Kurogane wanted it_ and.  And fuck Fai and his bad ideas and his bleak eyes anyways.  He had no idea how he was supposed to separate wanting to bash Fai’s head in from wanting to do absolutely everything else with him.  It was the same damn emotion.   Kurogane took the one step he hadn’t taken yet, the one that closed all the space that was left between him and Fai and the kitchen table covered in baking tins.  If this was it and there was only once, at least he’d do it carefully enough this time that Fai didn’t smash into anything.

Fai jerked reflexively—like he was still somehow surprised—and all the muffin tins went crashing to the floor anyway.

“ _Jesus_ ,” Kurogane said, quietly, honestly angry, and brushed their mouths together with all the intent of carefulness in the world, and pushed everything else off the table.  Because he didn’t know how to go about any kind of kiss that wasn’t fueled by pure pissed-offness but hell if he had the time to wait for Fai to stop looking frozen and throw him a bone.  He almost expected Fai to taste frozen, too.  He didn’t care. 

But when he yanked at a fistful of the back of Fai’s shirt collar, too frustrated not to let it show _somewhere_ , Fai made a low, despairing sound and let himself lean in solidly.  Pressed up close.  He tasted like baked sweet things and sleeplessness and nothing at all like ice.  Their ankles knocked together when Fai moved restlessly like he might make a mistake and let himself do more than lean.  It was shocking how badly Kurogane wished that he would, how badly he needed Fai to make good on that tiny promise of heat and pressure.  What the hell was there left to doubt?

If it was him.  If Fai was doubting _him_ —

Fai rested one light hand at Kurogane’s waist, agonizingly careful, eyes wide open.  Not even kissing back this time, just—just barely—staying there.  It was the look of a man who’d been handed something he desperately wanted and could never take.  The look of someone who was allowing himself one last second of terrible longing before he turned away.

Fai had looked him flat in the eyes in the library and said that he did not doubt Kurogane.  Fai was a fucking _liar_.  Always had been a liar.  But Kurogane didn’t care about that either; he was going to make Fai come clean.  He was.

Or at least, he was going to make it past Fai’s shirt this time before Fai remembered to stop him.  Before Fai noticed how close he was to giving in, again— _just give in, fuck you,_ please _give in_ , Kurogane wanted to shout it at him, beg him for it, swear he’d remember it this time, swear he’d walk away himself after if Fai would only just—before Fai could pick up all his guilt again and pull away for good.  He was determined, and furious, and afraid to do anything but move forward.  Afraid to give Fai the chance to run.  He knew he was going to lose to all that emptiness that Fai had spent forever storing up.  It didn’t fucking matter.  Not thinking about anything except friction, not letting himself hesitate at all, Kurogane pushed one thigh, slow, in between both of Fai’s.  The stutter-start in Fai’s fingers against his side was an afterthought.  An accident.  There was no promise here that Fai intended to keep. 

Kurogane closed his own eyes in case Fai could read them, ducked out of the kiss, and yanked Fai’s shirt up and off by the neck.

This would end it, Kurogane knew.  The palm of his hand was planted hard against the bare edge of Fai’s spine in case Fai decided to bolt and he had to grab for him. 

Fai was still staring at him, just watching, stunned, with that expression that Kurogane couldn’t stomach from so close now that Kurogane couldn’t help but see it.  He was sure as hell looking now.  Stupid wizard was too skinny, probably; he felt half starved under Kurogane’s hands.  His skin had planes and edges and if Kurogane only had until Fai noticed his mistake and changed his mind, Kurogane didn’t think he could get close enough, fast enough.  Not enough time.  Too many edges, too many ribs.  The worst part was that it didn’t matter; Kurogane wanted him anyway.  Wanted him entirely.

He wanted so much more than Fai’s bare skin under his rushed fingers, too shocked to run.  He wanted to find somewhere to touch Fai, someplace that would be enough to make him just stop it.  Or—to make him start.  To make Fai do _something about it_.  How could he not know? It made Kurogane want to bite him on the face out of pure frustration. 

He knew he was giving Fai more teeth than tongue, and he didn’t give a shit because Fai hadn’t stopped him yet.  Wasn’t stopping him.  Even slanted himself a little into the kiss, shaky but unresisting, when Kurogane gave up and grabbed him by the jaw and _held_ him there.   It wasn’t enough. 

But, “Kuro-pin,” Fai sighed against his mouth after a while; not a struggle but a wry, disgruntled kind of sigh so that Kurogane had to pause and lose precious time considering what Fai was actually saying, “are you seriously not going to give me the satisfaction of at least _pretending_ to be a nervous virgin?  I won’t feel justified in having tried to protect you if you won’t.”

“That’s— What.” Kurogane dropped his hands.  Neither of them moved.  That was not what—all this time he’d been fighting and that was what—  He took a slow breath.  Felt the air scrape horribly on the way in.

He felt sick.  Fai _looked_ sick.  Like he’d only just now heard his own words.

“I’m sorry,” said Fai; it was two words too many.  He was still leaning into Kurogane’s body and it was too goddamn close.

“Fuck you,” Kurogane growled, “is that what you fucking _wanted_?”

“No,” Fai said, sliding back until only the very tips of their noses were touching.  He wasn’t lying now.  “No.  I just wanted you.  And I’m—” he caught himself, visibly, before he could say it again.

Every part of Kurogane except for that single point of contact was numb.  That—

That wasn’t—

Gulping at nothing, Kurogane tried to say—anything, really, but it came out as a scratchy noise that was no one’s idea of speech.  His heart was suddenly hammering, he knew, but he couldn’t feel it.  He might have been completely hollow.  All he could feel was Fai, waiting, holding himself very still as though the balance might tip if he moved.

For the very first time since he’d broken the curse and turned around, Kurogane was frozen with the terrifying hope that it might tip in his favour.

 Fai huffed, someplace between amused and surprisingly gentle, and broke the stillness himself.  Kurogane didn’t know what Fai’d seen to make him sound like that.  Couldn’t imagine what was showing on his face to make anyone look at him that way.  “All right then,” Fai said, serious. 

He scuffed his knuckles up the back of Kurogane’s neck, a warm, careful affection, and stood on tiptoe to kiss him _nicely_.  He sure as hell felt _that_.  How was he supposed to know what the fuck to do with that, now?  With _nice_? When Kurogane snarled, pulled around and frustrated to the point of aching, Fai shifted to laugh apologetically into the hollow under his ear.  “Come on, Kuro-wan, I’m right here—I’m telling you, you’ve already caught me.  You can bark as much as you want, but I’ll still know why you baked me all those muffins.”

And suddenly, just like that, Fai was helping whether Kurogane wanted the help or not.  Toeing his own boots off and then prodding at Kurogane’s until Kurogane remembered to kick them off, too; jerking Kurogane’s belt through its loops with steady hands while Kurogane wished for something to hang on to and had to settle for Fai’s hips.  There was a dip just there, soft even though Fai was all sharp bones and narrow muscle under his clothes, and Fai was letting Kurogane run his thumbs along it because he was—because Fai was taking his pants off.  Because it turned out he was going to let Kurogane see him naked and—Jesus, and _hard_ , without making him try at all.

Even though he would have tried anything.

Kurogane felt like someone had yanked everything out from under him, all his fight and his anger and his desperation, and left only Fai behind.  It was all Fai and Fai’s eyelashes and the quirk of Fai’s mouth, dragging him along like always.  Like this had been Fai’s idea all along.  Kurogane wanted to be furious about it, he remembered being furious about it, but it was like trying to remember through ten forgetting curses and Fai’s insistent heat.  Instead of getting angry, Kurogane stretched them out full-length on the table with a thud.

“Hahh,” Fai made a quiet, hot sound that was half tease and half shudder, and Kurogane could _feel_ it.  They were skin to skin.  “Yes, that—should work.”

“Work _how_ , exactly?”  Kurogane wasn’t stupid and Fai wasn’t subtle, not with his sudden steadiness underneath Kurogane’s weight and not with the way he couldn’t ever seem stop letting Kurogane in even when he meant to be fighting him, but Kurogane intended to be very sure. 

Everywhere they were touching was so, so good, but he was going to be sure.

“Well, I was thinking, probably with the cooking oil.”  Fai arched one eyebrow like he was joking right now, still putting up some kind of front, and Kurogane was so damn serious he could _kill_ — 

“Tch,” Fai said, which was absolutely Kurogane’s line, and slid dripping slick fingers down Kurogane’s cock with the worst kind of magic, there and then gone.  Leaving him strung tight with burning, buzzing need.  “Don’t look at me like that, Kuro-tan; it’s a classic choice.”  Fai curved up neatly to butt his forehead against Kurogane’s shoulder, fingers tracing all the way up and around Kurogane’s spine leaving hot, sliding scrawls everywhere that he touched.  Kurogane could feel Fai’s breath quick against his collarbone and the warm barely-there way Fai’s belly brushed against his own on every inhale.  He didn’t necessarily remember how to move.  “See?” Fai breathed, as if he planned to fucking _talk Kurogane through it_.  After everything else.

Kurogane forgot all the reasons he’d built up not to just sink his teeth into Fai’s jaw, but Fai only hissed hotly like he _liked_ it, not concerned in the least with Kurogane’s brewing rage, and slid a hand back between his own legs.  _God_.  His erection pressed up against Kurogane’s, dragging against him slow and then faster, restlessly—because Fai was moving his hips, because Fai was—Kurogane shoved Fai’s hand aside and did it himself, two fingers, fast, faster than he would have done it to himself, but he was trying his damndest not to notice how carefully Fai was watching him, even while Fai’s hands slid and scrabbled at the table as he tried to brace himself.  Oil was going to be _everywhere_ , Jesus.

“Now?” Kurogane rasped, starting to lose focus—more of a formality than a question.  Fai gave up on the table and was digging hard fingers into Kurogane’s forearm instead, hanging on like he was the one kept waiting.  So Kurogane let Fai reel him in, pressed in with a slowness that was going to kill him if he and Fai didn’t kill each other first.

 “Hah!” Fai barked, too sharp and sudden, head arched back so that there was no way to see his face, and Kurogane stopped dead.  Too fast.  Too tight. “Ah, um,” Kurogane watched Fai’s throat constrict, felt him jerk and shudder from the inside, “shit.”

“Are you—” Kurogane tried to ask, but then it didn’t matter because Fai might have been skinny but he was strong and fast as hell, too, and somewhere he’d found the leverage to flip them both.  He might’ve used magic.  Kurogane didn’t mind.  Not with Fai suddenly stretched over him, sinking all the way down _on_ him, salt and sweat and real.  Not with Fai bearing all his weight down on Kurogane’s wrist pinned at his side and his other hand pressed scalding and heavy against the bare skin below Kurogane’s navel.  His expression was somewhere between starving and shocked, as if he’d still only barely believed that it would work.  Kurogane wanted to be angry about that, too, but instead he arched up, returning the pressure.

Fai slid forward without letting go and knocked their foreheads together, wet hair sticking a little—or maybe that was still cooking oil.  “Kuro-rin,” Fai said, sounding as dangerous as Kurogane had ever heard him, “don’t _stop_.”

So Kurogane didn’t.  Fai had had him at advantage since the very first, an advantage that Kurogane was never going to reverse.  He didn’t even care.  Fai bit at him and pissed him off and dug in and ran away and, when it counted, _stayed_ , and Kurogane had probably always wanted— _god_ , he wanted—to lose.  He could feel in the slow, hard shift of his hips how badly Fai wanted to draw this out, but Kurogane was sweating and single-minded and it was months and years too late for that.

“Fuck you,” Kurogane panted with his tongue on Fai’s skin, pushing up harder because he didn’t dare move _faster_ , “Fuck you, come _on_ —or I’ll—”  Fai tugged Kurogane’s caught wrist down between them in a clear demand and Kurogane hissed in empty air.  Fai had their fingers twined together around himself, guiding Kurogane’s grip like he was going to _show him how_ , and Kurogane growled.  Like hell, he was going to.

It was a delicate thing, a more careful endeavour than Kurogane had the time for, measuring out all the things Kurogane wanted to do to Fai, with Fai.  So he didn’t bother thinking about it or letting Fai show him, just grabbed for _more_ instead.  And this time Fai took one slow, shaking breath and let him have it. 

“Hold on,” Fai said, and touched his mouth, open and wet and so soft, just at the corner of Kurogane’s lip where he’d bitten him, once.  Not quite a kiss.  Not quite a request.  There was a fine tremor running through him, a tension that Kurogane could feel everywhere that they were connected, like maybe Fai was much farther gone than he was letting on and only holding on by force of will himself.  “Wait.”

If that was meant as an order, Kurogane discovered that he was going to ignore it spectacularly.  There was sex, and there was holding on, and then there was holding on for _years_ without ever knowing what you were holding on to—and Kurogane was done. 

He was done, and he didn’t care what complaints Fai might have about it because he couldn’t hear them over the sudden, brilliant rush of his own blood.  He was absolutely fucking intent on dragging Fai over with him, after him; he was desperate with it.  Couldn’t breathe through it.

And Fai was breathing wrong _with_ him, was definitely shaking now, too.

Doggedly not finished yet, Kurogane tightened his grip on Fai, relentless and reckless.   He watched, fascinated—absolutely distracted—as Fai gritted out something painful-sounding and arched, taut and trapped and breathless.  He was instantly oversensitive; the edge of sensation as Fai jerked back on his cock, clenching, was much too sharp; and Fai was digging his fingers into Kurogane’s stomach and coming all over himself in wet, white stripes, so that seemed like absolutely no reason to stop.

They stared at each other, gasping, wrung out and caught there.  There was a look on Fai’s face like shock without the sharp edges; Kurogane didn’t particularly want to know _what_ his own expression was giving away.  But he didn’t want to look away.

 “Oh, well,” Fai sighed and then shivered, going perfectly limp over Kurogane, half laughing but completely matter-of-fact.  “Fine. Have it your way, then.”  He burrowed a bit, rearranging Kurogane’s skeleton to his better convenience.

Kurogane decided it was probably safe to close his eyes again now, with Fai draped heavy and inert on top of him.  He could worry about the rest of everything later.

 

But, “You know,” Fai said not long enough later at all, sitting up and swinging his legs lazily over the edge of the table, “I’ve been thinking.”

“Hngh.”  Kurogane didn’t move, but he sure as hell woke up.  Since they’d both been naked all over the table already—were both in fact still naked all over it—Kurogane didn’t see much point in finding a better place to be.  The warm sunshine that poured in through the kitchen window to spill all over his stomach was pretty nice, as well.  Kurogane _felt_ pretty nice in general.

Except for this new stirring of apprehension, just when he thought he was allowed to be done with it.

“Mm-hmm.”  Apparently deciding he felt the same way about the table, Fai flopped back down beside Kurogane uselessly, fiddling with a stray whisk.  Kurogane made himself relax again.  “About what to do now that we don’t have to do this anymore.  And I know that you’ll be an excellent baker,” he prodded his whisk between Kurogane’s ribs like he intended to fight for more of the sunny patch.  Kurogane didn’t bother moving.  Here was fine.  Fai sighed and gave up.  “An excellent baker.  Muffins especially.  But you know, Kuro-rin, there’s all kinds of bakers out there already.  And the North still has demons, if you’re serious about fortune seeking and you’re very determined to use those manly skills I know you have.  Or I suppose there’s always a war on somewhere that we could join.  If you brought your sword.”  The whisk swished ceilingwards through Kurogane’s field of vision in a gracefully limp sort of thrust and parry.

“We.” Kurogane blinked slowly, considering that while he let the warmth from the sunshine soak into his toes.  He was _still_ not going fortune seeking and he didn’t care who thought they got a say in it.  As for the rest of it...

“I mean, only if you—Well, not if—” Fai stumbled, whisk sword freezing in midair.

“Tch.”  Fucking _wizards_.  What was the use of all that—everything, if Kurogane couldn’t even drop his guard for one damn second? Kurogane rolled his eyes and asked instead, “Have you ever been?”

Fai laughed in a flat way that Kurogane didn’t trust at all, a way that suggested he was suddenly fascinated with absolutely everything except what Kurogane had to say.  “Have I ever been _what_ , Kuro-sama?”

“Have you ever been to the North, or to anywhere that there’s a war? Have you ever been... anywhere at all.”

“Yes?”  Fai quirked his shoulders as if this might’ve been the wrong answer but he couldn’t be bothered to care.

“Then— I haven’t.  You can pick.”

“Oh.” Fai said.  And then, much more interestedly, “Really?”

“Yeah.” Kurogane snorted.  Ridiculous.  They were stretched out so close together that he could actually feel Fai screwing everything up in his head without even looking over there.  As if he’d give up now, having won the fight.  As if there was a _chance_.  But then he paused, because Fai could very well keep on misunderstanding forever, probably on purpose.  “You thought I meant, have you ever... that.  _We_.”

“Hmm.  Aren’t you curious?”

“Nah,” Kurogane shrugged, and then when Fai craned around to look at him like he actually had the balls to be offended that Kurogane wasn’t asking: “Have you _seen_ this place?  All you’ve got is books and more goddamn books.   I’m not stupid; I can guess.”


End file.
